Category: Opinion

A while ago, I learned that many business folks speak a different language from me as an engineer. When talking to them about cool technologies, algorithms, and making a legacy built on software, they are trying to figure out how to map that to their world – revenue and expenses. Without talking in their terms, I was losing them in mere seconds.

I bring this up, because it seems most recruiters have an upside down view of how I seek a new full time opportunity.

“Urgent opportunity!”, “Software engineer position in Nowhere, ID”, and “great comprehensive packages” are not what I am looking for.

If you want to speak my language, tell me:

How does this role matter?

What kind of people will I work with?

Does management have a clear vision of the kind of future they want to pursue?

Does the business have sufficient resources to reasonably tackle these problems?

How far along in the process are they?

What challenges still remain?

In short, if I work on achieving someone else’s dreams, it must also fit my own. My dream is that I change the world for the better in meaningful ways for as many people as possible. I specifically want to reduce their suffering and increase their quality of life.

April 24th, 2015, the Apple Watch is scheduled to be released. It will fail. I’ll tell you why.

Initial Reaction

Initially, all the Apple fans will buy their obligitory new device to prove devotion. Everyone else will still be trying to understand why they need an expensive watch that’s even more delicate than a normal one. Everyone else will still be trying to figure out what that watch does for them that their iPhone doesn’t already do.

Deal Breakers

Battery life

When someone traditionally thinks about wearing a watch, they want something reliable to tell time. If you look at the Citizen Eco watches, it helps keep the watch going without winding. Even without this, a traditional watch with watch battery is going to last years. One that uses a side winding many people do once a day, but it just takes a second and can be done anywhere. Automatic winding watches can be worn daily without much winding just due to the normal motion of your arms. The Apple Watch by contrast will have a rated 18 hour battery life. Post release, we will find out if that’s screen on time or not. In addition, Apple watch is charged using yet another special USB cable.

Fashion

Another reason people often wear a watch is that some of them are downright beatiful works of art. Engineering wise Apple Watch is a work of art, fashion wise, not so much.

Value

Considering the cost of the watch (something like $1k), you expect this thing to do something really neat that has never been done. The truth is, except for the fitness applications, I can’t really see the value in any of the other features to make people want yet another thing to charge, another thing to carry, and another thing to spend their hard earned money on.

Summary

In short, I think the Apple Watch is solving an aggregation problem that doesn’t exist, will fail to do it at a valuable price point, and will fail to do it well enough. The only possible benefit I can think of is for people who regret buying their iPhone 6+, so they want a small device again.

I had a chance to get a Google Glass. Being the sucker for trying new technology that I am, I gave it a shot. Here’s what I learned.

Pros

Navigation app gives simple instructions, with high contrast drawings of the road.

Taking pictures is dirt easy

Taking videos is dirt easy

Touch pad on the side gives an alternative for constantly talking to the phone.

Cons

Battery life sucks – “one day of use”.

Realistically a few hours of intensive use, and then it’s over. For example, I drove from Myrtle Beach, SC back to Raleigh, NC using it for GPS and had to switch back to my phone midway.

Related to this, the device is inoperable while charging. This means it would not be possible to rig a shirt pocket battery with micro usb extension to it.

I put a 9300mah battery on my phone for a reason. 5 days of normal use seems a lot more usable than one typical day. In the example above, I used my phone for gps going to Myrtle Beach using the phone at full bright the entire time. It drained about a third. Glass turns off its prism after a few seconds. It still only went maybe 2/3 of the way before it was saying it had low battery.

Asymmetrical design isn’t really for me.

Partial fix for this and above would be to include a battery on both sides instead of just one.

Huge thing sticking out of the top right of your head

Fix for this would be to pull back the prism and entire unit going back towards the ear. Then directly put the prism into the side of the lens, getting rid of the glass-less glass.

Had to get contacts – not compatible with my existing glasses.

I actually wear glasses. Using google glasses with my glasses was a no go since the camera area collides with the prescription frames. You also end up with two nose pieces.

As a side note, prescription glasses for this thing will probably be crazy expensive.

Even with contacts, I only got the tinted non-prescription lenses free. The clear ones were another $75. Very expensive for clear glass or rather plastic.

Common workflows needs help.

Take a picture with glass, autobackup will put it on your google account at some random time. Generally soon if you are on wifi. Go to google photos and deal with them. Your phone will have a notification about the photos. You’ll also still have a copy of the photos on the google glass, which appear if you plug them into your computer which wants to import them like a camera.

There needs to be a lot more work on single instancing the data across devices and work to process it.

TURN OFF THE NOTIFICATIONS

Notifications make a slight buzz on the bone conductor thing. It will make a slight sound and end up tickling your ear.

I am a bit of a mindshare snob. I don’t allow emails to chime when they come in. IMs don’t beep, bloop, ding, chirp, bounce, wave, flash, or jump to focus. I send people to voicemail if I don’t know them. My concentration is important. I can’t be randomly disturbed because an email from some random person came in. If Google provides a way to reverse this, only notifying you with things you whitelist, then I would be much happier. Until then, just give me a way to turn all of that off.

Google Glass is outside the glasses.

Tinted glasses will dim your Glass Screen.

Mono ear piece kept falling out of my ear. Completely unusable.

Not really a fan of the visible screws (to someone talking to you) right between the eyes.

No easy way to “put it away”.

Device is flexible not collapsible. If you go to do something with it, besides wear it, the only thing you can do is put it above your eyes like a woman’s hair hoop, but less secure.

You’re encouraged to talk to it.

No offense Google, but I’m not talking to my phone/glasses in public.

Head Position sensors

You can wake glass by tilting your head up. Really?! Can I have some lawsuit with that strained neck? Besides being silly, this just seems like a bad idea.

Navigation app doesn’t do adhoc changes.

I was driving somewhere. My wife asks me if we can stop at the next rest stop on our route. Asking Glass to help out greeted me with the option to look at the overhead map or stop the route.

Starting up gives no feedback for several seconds.

If you push the button to turn it on, then put it on your head, the delay is long enough, you end up taking them off to verify that it is indeed booting/starting. You can tell by looking at the back of the power button. By then, you’ll see something is finally shining in the eyepiece.

Setup oddly confusing.

Maybe the setup was simple for the guy who invented it, but as a professional computer programmer for 16 years for everything from C64 basic to .NET apps, network apps, server apps, DB apps, and mobile apps, I couldn’t easily figure out what they wanted to setup the device.

Glass App seems confusing too. I would expect to be able to explore the device more, but it seems like a stub service application with just a few UI bits on it. Some things I would have expected to be able to do: Browse the files, view logs, get battery level, projected run time, and so on.

Other Interesting Bits

Social Acceptance

I thought I was going to have more problems with people wearing it than I had. I think that was helped by the fact that I used the tinted glasses rather than go without a lens, am a fairly big guy, and wasn’t obnoxious about wearing glass.

I actually had more people ask me about my Galaxy Note II (with extended battery) inside an arm band case on my arm. I don’t know if they were really curious, or just trying to tell me I had a phablet on my arm 😉

Only time will tell if it will end up outlawed everywhere. If it is, will it be outlawed if it is off?

Not ready for prime time

If Google is just happy to get early adopters when they go full release, then they will probably get it.

If Google wants general consumption. I think it’s not ready for that. Just too many important things in the Con list.

Limited use

While this device seems like it should have a lot of possibilities, I’m struggling to identify the practical applications. I’m sure as more applications come out, people smarter than me will hopefully figure out how to do non-perverted, non-orwellian, and life enriching applications. If I had to guess, I’d say that camera/gps based recognition of objects/places will end up being the top practical feature. Ease of photos probably the best impulse recreation use. If they can get the battery life up, probably navigation will add into the practical uses.

There have been a lot of claims about the rise of tablet sales, the decline of PC sales spelling the death of the PC. In this article, I’ll not only explain why that’s exaggerated, but also what is actually happening.

The Core Markets Are The Same

If you follow the sales of PCs, you will see how the early units were by today’s standards, very expensive in the buying power at the time they were released, while the capabilities were somewhat basic. Work, write a letter/essay, or play games. Not really much else.

So, who bought them? People who believed that what it did was worth what it cost.

Those were people who:

Believed in new technology

Needed it for work

Tinkering types who could come up with the money

Rich people

For clarity, in the rest of the article, I’ll refer to the list above as the Professional market and anyone else as the Consumer market.

As the price of computers fell, the format available to the Consumer market primarily were desktops and laptops. Once the internet started to catch on, people started using it to explore and communicate with others digitally. The Consumer market was interested generally with the cheapest machines which fulfilled their desire to:

Browse the web

Email

Play games

Consume media

The only machines available to fill that need were desktops and laptops. Desktops for a long time were just cheaper and more reliable than laptops.

At the point that laptops really started to catch up in delivering a comparable value to desktops, shortly after, the tablet market entered. The commoditization of cheap computers made by Apple and all the Android based vendors allowed for computers which really did everything that the consumer wanted.

As a consequence, consumers did the most natural thing. Bought the devices which fit their needs.

Why Not Tablets For All?

In a Professional market, the need for better computers, more reliable computers, faster data entry, customization, bigger screens, exploration of technology will continually drive a path for a niche of devices not necessarily the cheapest thing that gets you on the internet and plays games.

In A Nutshell

Professionals will still need what they originally needed and keep buying it. Consumers only needed what they needed and will keep buying appropriate devices. PC-like devices will continue to sell as long as people continue to need them.

Let’s face it. Windows RT failed.

Rather than hide our heads in the sand, let’s understand why.

It might seem easy to dogpile on Microsoft regarding their RT project, but there were some key indicators to not only allow us to see retrospectively why it failed, but would have allowed Microsoft to see why it was at enormous risk before it even started the project.

A short history lesson on Microsoft Hardware

Microsoft has an expensive and dismal record when it comes to hardware.

Anyone remember Microsoft Phone? Not talking cell phones here. Before that they had a cordless phone. Still don’t remember? For good reason. It died just after they purchased it.

Next up is XBox. Have they ever made money? If you roll them up into the entire entertainment section of Microsoft, then maybe it looks good, but just the Xbox portion isn’t too good.

Microsoft Kin. Maybe you were one of the 503 Kin owners Verizon managed to sell? This device flopped so hard, the apathy created a singularity somewhere in the universe.

Microsoft Surface RT and to a lesser degree Surface Pro tablets have failed to capture our imaginations. You can tell Microsoft is desperate, because every commercial compares them to someone else better received.

So, why did all these fail?

In the end, I believe it comes down to several factors:

At it’s core, Microsoft innovates software platforms.
Look at every success Microsoft has had at both capturing the hearts and imaginations of their audience. They did it by building software platforms that other people were expected to extend.

Microsoft has lost their vision
Where are they going with each one of their hardware experiments? I think they failed to deliver on something amazing because they had no idea where they are going with this. Take the last product. Surface RT and Pro. Did they really believe people wouldn’t be confused? RT looks cheaper, until you realize, it won’t run any of your regular windows apps, and oh, by the way software developers, it only has a subset of the programming platform we’ve been selling you on using for over a decade. Have fun!

Microsoft spent too long staring at the backs of their competitors.
Microsoft will never be able to get their vision back as long as they let their view fill up with the the ground that’s already been paved by competition.

Decisions need to become less political.
It’s very clear (at least to me) that too many projects are taken to completion at Microsoft, only because someone can’t affort to lose face. Some projects fail. Some ideas are bad. Let’s just accept that. Once we have, we can start making decisions to stop pursuing bad ones earlier.

What can they do about it, now?

Microsoft needs to get back to their roots.

Instead of making XBoxes, they should be making XNA frameworks, and encouraging hardware vendors to make the hardware (or one specific one). Instead of making Surface RT, they needed to build up their platforms which allow developers not only to target battery powered devices with touch screens, but do it in a way where their applications behave, perform as expected, and easily. Instead of looking for the next, “Me too!” project that competitors have already hit, and hit well, they need to think about where they can be the next leap ahead – where they can win back the confidence of their partners. Microsoft needs more guys in basements to believe that they can innovate with their platforms again.

Last, but not least, Microsoft needs to either replace Steve Ballmer, or he needs to have a big change of heart. Steve shouldn’t be afraid to surround himself with men greater than himself. He should embrace the need for greatness in his inner circle.

If you agree or disagree with this article, let me know.

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About This Site

This site contains the opinions and writings of John Goodwin. His opinions are his and his alone. Any company affiliations are unrelated to these opinions, and unless specifically stated otherwise, no sponsorship of messages are involved in anyway. If there is any question, or doubt as to the meaning, or content, rights, or other concerns, please contact the owner of the site for further questions.

Find Us

Mailing Address9650 Strickland Rd #103-103Raleigh, NC 27615

About This Site

This site contains the opinions and writings of John Goodwin. His opinions are his and his alone. Any company affiliations are unrelated to these opinions, and unless specifically stated otherwise, no sponsorship of messages are involved in anyway. If there is any question, or doubt as to the meaning, or content, rights, or other concerns, please contact the owner of the site for further questions.